


Mutually Assured

by Xparrot



Category: Gargoyles
Genre: F/M, Human Demona, Post-Cartoon, Present Tense, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:25:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xparrot/pseuds/Xparrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn't hear him coming, not until Macbeth is already in her private study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mutually Assured

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LovelyZelda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovelyZelda/gifts).



> While this was one of my earliest fandoms - I've loved the series since it first aired - I've never written these chars before. I can only hope I did them and their eternally twisted relationship justice.
> 
> Set post-"Hunter's Moon", ignoring Chronicles/comics canon.

Her human senses are pathetic. Human ears are too small, practically useless, and human eyes are even worse; colors might be brighter in daylight, but the least shadows render her all but blind. She hates having to turn on electric lights just to be able to see when it's cloudy, almost as much as she hates having to bundle up in clothes to protect her wretched tender human skin from chill.

She hates most of all that she doesn't hear or see him coming, not until Macbeth is already in her private study.

She stayed in this place too long. Not because she particularly likes Vancouver—the surrounding mountains are attractive hunting grounds, but the city itself is uninspired even for a human creation, each building as boring as every other one around it. But then, most of the New World irritates her; it's all so young and trite. This city's no worse than another, and she's spent the money to make the penthouse worth living in, with luxuries to pamper and coddle her frail human body, like the hot tub and the plush leather couch she's sitting on now. Most importantly, there's a skylight positioned on the roof such that at night no one can see her leaving, even the building's own security. Recently such concealment's become important wherever she goes; there are would-be gargoyle stalkers gawking up at the night skies in cities around the world.

The disadvantage of the skylight's positioning is that no one can see anyone entering by it, either. She thought it inaccessible to those lacking wings and claws to climb, but apparently not, because here he is, closing the door behind him. It locks with a click that sounds ominous even to her useless human ears.

He's dressed in black but unmasked, not pretending to be anyone but who he is, gray hair, gray beard, gray eyes glaring at her with familiar hate. And he has a gun—a small caliber pistol, a 9mm perhaps, short-barreled and small enough to be engulfed by his big hand. Were she her true self, she'd have little to fear from it; but it's still an hour before sunset, and she's unarmed.

She shouldn't have tarried in this juvenile city for so long—almost four months, long enough for him to track her across the continent, over the rivers and the mountains and the endless metaphorical miles of financial transactions and computer networks.

They can both remember a time when it would've taken him as many months just to make the crossing; even with her wings it would've been a long journey. But the humans have their own wings now, after a fashion; he might have been in New York only this morning. Or in Europe the night before—she's not sure where he's been residing these days; she doesn't bother to keep track.

Though perhaps she ought to keep cursory tabs—it would prevent such awkward situations as these. She has weapons of her own in the room, the closest being the .44 Magnum in the desk's top drawer, but the couch she's seated on is on the wrong side of the desk. Besides, a gun would do her no good against him, not when he knows she'd not risk a lethal shot. There's a panic button on the desk as well, but that too is yards away and it's likely deactivated anyway; there should have been alarms going off the moment he set foot on the roof, so he must have managed to shut down her security system somehow. Unreliable human technology—someone's head will roll for that failure.

If her own doesn't roll first, that is. But she's breathing yet; where there's a will there's a way, and where there's breath there's opportunity, even with her deficient human lungs. "So what are you planning to do with that?" she asks, nodding at the pistol as she closes the lid of the laptop resting on her knees. "Putting a hole in me will hurt you as much as it'll hurt me."

"Not if it's through your heart," he says flatly, and his hand gripping the gun is as steady as his voice.

Neither of them would be feeling any pain then. But he has yet to fire. "So go ahead, shoot me," she says, and sets her computer aside on the coffee table, so that she's unshielded, exposed with only the sheer green silk of her blouse between his gun and her fragile human chest.

His eyes narrow and for an instant she wonders if she made a dire mistake, challenging him like that. Sometimes she forgets that this isn't the same man she fought before, against and alongside. The Macbeth she allied with so long ago had been neither a coward nor a lunatic.

Ironic, that she's been called insane, when this man before her now lives only to die. How can it be mad for a living thing to want to go on living? He's the madman, to keep going on only because he wants to stop. She'll never understand it.

Nor would she care, except that he'll only get the death he so madly seeks over her dead body, a method to which she soundly, sanely objects.

But not at this instant. Now, though his finger remains on the gun's trigger, he doesn't pull it. Instead he says, "What are you plotting? What's your scheme this time, Demona?"

"My scheme?" she repeats, tilting her head up at him.

"What were you doing with that computer?" he says. "Because I doubt you were playing a game or downloading an MP3."

It momentarily surprises her that he's heard of MP3s—a hundred years ago he'd scarcely known what radio was, had thought she was casting a curse, not understanding the new technological magic humans were learning, even as they lost the old spells. But then, a hundred years ago he hadn't been so determined to kill himself, either. This last century has perhaps wrought as many changes in him as the entire millennium before.

She neither understands nor cares about that, either. "As it happens, I was writing an email," she answers his question. "I do have a financial empire to manage."

"And I know what you use those finances for," he says. "I received an email myself not too long ago, with the details about your plan with the homegrown plague and the Praying Gargoyle."

" _You_ have an email address?" That's even more surprising than the MP3s. "Perhaps we should exchange them. Staying connected is so important in this modern world."

"You're a monster," he says, grim and emphatic, as if he's reminding himself. "What's your plot? Tell me, or by God I'll pull this trigger anyway, and to hell with the consequences."

The laptop, left untouched, beeps as it powers down. She crosses her legs and sets her hands on her knees, laces her fingers together casually. "Must I always have a plot?"

"You've been living here for months, and your security is so lax it took me less than twenty-four hours to find a way in—you practically invited me here. Why, Demona? What damned game are you playing?"

She lowers her head, looks up at him through auburn lashes. "Has it occurred to you that maybe this is the game? To bring you here, before me?"

His bark of laughter is harsh, joyless. "Are you telling me you've finally wearied of this existence as well? I won't believe it. Not you."

But his hands holding the pistol tremble—a mere fraction of an inch, but that fraction is enough to tell her she's got the winning cards after all. She only needs play them right. "No," she says, her face still lowered, her voice quiet. "I don't want to die—I didn't want you here for that."

"Then _why_?"

"Shouldn't you know?" she says, softer still, almost teasing in how he'll have to strain to hear her whisper, with his hopeless human ears. "Shouldn't you of anyone understand—you who's lived through nearly as many lonely years as I have?"

"I'd never understand a murderous monster like you," Macbeth snarls.

"And yet you came here. At my...'invitation'."

"To kill you—to do what I should've managed centuries ago. That email told me what you tried to do, would have done if Goliath and his clan hadn't stopped you. Knowing the havoc you tried to wreak upon the world, I knew I had to find you. Had to end your evil, once and for all."

"How noble," she says; it's a struggle, but she manages to suppress the sarcasm, whispers the words instead of spitting them. "So why don't you do it, then? Don't tell me you're afraid."

"I'm only afraid of what you're plotting," he says. "I'm afraid of how long I've underestimated your insanity. All this time I've hunted you for myself, my own vengeance, when I should have been trying first to stop you for the sake of all of humankind. But that's not a mistake I'll make again—I can't afford such selfishness. I won't risk the world."

"So that's why you've hesitated—because you think that trying to kill me will trigger a trap, set my latest plans in motion." She drops her gaze from his face to her hands, unfolds her interlaced fingers. "What if I told you there was no trap?"

"I'd never believe that—you, planning nothing?"

"Of course I have plans," she says. "But none involving you—none that you'll initiate with that," and she nods at the gun. She keeps her eyes down, not meeting his, so he can't judge her honesty.

"Liar," he growls—a thready weak growl, the pathetic parody of a gargoyle's anger. "Why else would you want me here?"

"Because," and she grits her teeth so the words sound forced, as if she can scarcely bring herself to say them, "because sometimes I'm weak—because this damned body is weak. Because it's colder and lonelier being a human than it is to be a gargoyle, even after all those centuries when I thought I was the last of us." She wraps her arms across her chest, her fingers digging into her biceps, the pale soft flesh beneath the silk sleeves giving under her bruising grip.

He's close enough to feel that; out of the corner of her eye she sees the wince cross his face, before he checks it. But the gun stays steady in his hand.

"Because," she says, dropping her voice still lower, barely breathing it, "sometimes I find myself wanting the company of someone who knows me." She pries her hands from her arms, brings them across her chest and brushing her throat, fingertips skimming the strange soft skin under the open collar of her blouse. "Who understands the isolation of all those passing centuries, the solitude of being outside time, how you remain, while everything around you changes in what seems like the blink of an eye."

"Demona..." Macbeth says, just as low. He takes a step towards her where she sits on the couch, hunched forward, curled over on herself. She doesn't dare risk looking up to see his expression, to see if the pistol might finally be wavering, but his voice is rough, doubting. Almost, almost—

Then he laughs, as harshly as before, but with genuine amusement. "What kind of fool do you take me for? You're not so fine an actress as that."

His tone is derisive, and she snarls, furious, for all that barely a rasp emerges from her narrow human throat. But he's that one step closer now—one step close enough, and she moves, slamming her right hand down hard against the edge of the glass-topped coffee table. The glass is too thick to shatter under such a feeble blow, but the angled corner is solid enough that she hears the crack of fracturing bone. She bites her tongue against the pain as Macbeth grunts sharply and drops the pistol.

Before it's clattered to the floor, she's sprung up from the couch to tackle him around the legs, knocking him down. The back of his head bangs against the hardwood floor and her own skull rings with the impact, dizzying. She shakes off the blow and scrambles for the fallen gun, but he grabs her ankle with his good hand and yanks her back toward him, pulling her arms and legs out from under her.

Her teeth click together hard as her chin bashes the floor. Macbeth throws himself forward, but she flips over onto her back to kick up with both legs—she's barefooted, of course; she doesn't subject herself to the torture of shoes unless she has to—and nearly sends him flying. He twists aside at the last instant, though, so her heel only grazes his ribs—bruising but not breaking, she can tell from the throb of pain in her chest. He's not wearing his body armor; it must have been too heavy for him to sneak in with it.

She shoves herself upright just in time to check his next charge. Before either of them can catch their breath, they're grappling, clawing and kicking at one another like rabid animals.

It's humiliating, that one of the greatest warriors in the world could be reduced to fighting for her life against a mere aged human. But this is not an equal contest; Macbeth's body may be an old man's, but he's fit and practiced, and he outweighs and outreaches her now. How she hates this worthless human body. She's tried to teach herself some human fighting techniques, but it's hard to master balance without wings and a tail, and her punches with her feeble human muscles might as well be finger-taps.

Then he gets behind her to lock his arm around her throat, crushing the air out of her even as she struggles, and as black spots begin to swarm before her eyes she realizes that there's more to fear than shame—realizes to her horror that she's losing this fight.

Macbeth's chokehold is slackening, and she can hear him gasping in her ears as they both fall to their knees—he's suffocating even as she is, his lungs screaming with the same ache as hers. This is a battle of attrition, and he'll lose consciousness himself before she's dead. But he's stronger than her, and with what strength he'll have remaining—

"No," she tries to say, wheezing with what little breath she can force from her lungs—too little, not even enough to beg. She no longer can struggle, her sight gone dark and her limbs as heavy as if they were stone, an irony she can't appreciate as she slumps helplessly to the floor. She's only half-aware of Macbeth dragging himself out from under her. He's panting for breath, his heaving gulps of breath echoing her own, and she can feel him lying beside her, the heat of his body pressed against her arm, softer than the hardwood floorboards under her back and calves and shoulders.

Finally he pushes himself up, and through her slowly clearing vision she sees him reaching over her—stretching his good left hand toward the fallen pistol, to end this. To end her.

She doesn't have the strength to punch him out, or kick him off her; she has only the strength to reach up to him, to wrap her arm around his shoulders and pull him down. He's too shaky to resist; he collapses on top of her, solid and heavy but softer than stone, and far warmer.

It's not an accident that their lips meet, crushed together, and she sacrifices what breath she's managed to gather, all the life she has offered in the kiss.

This is as great a risk as ever she's taken, a gamble as reckless as it is desperate, and for an agonizing moment she thinks it's failed, as he shudders and wrenches himself apart from her, crouched over her and straddling her thighs, holding her down. His gasps are ragged as he stares down at her, and the shock in his wide eyes obscures any other feeling. And he's got hold of the gun.

Then he chokes out, " _Demona_ ," a moan dragged from the pit of his belly, and she knows her gamble has paid off, even as he says, "No— _no!_ " and shoves the pistol against her chest, over her heart.

His hand is shaking; she can feel the barrel of the gun quavering as it digs in under her ribs, straining the green silk of her shirt.

She doesn't crane her neck to look at it; instead she looks up at his face over hers, meets his wide eyes. "Yes," she says, gentling her voice to the insipid tenderness of human flesh. "Please," and she puts her soft human hand over his trembling one.

"You're a monster," he says. "I know what you are; you're a monster and a beast and a danger to everything I've ever loved—"

"Yes," she says, "but you also loved this body, this woman, once, not knowing; and I want you to love it again. Even knowing that it's me."

"You—you expect me to believe..." He's gasping for breath, panting as if she's strangling him. "You expect me to believe that you'd risk your life—risk what I'd do to you, if I found you—just for a fuck?"

"Thailog betrayed me," she says. "As Goliath did, and keeps doing. Neither of them are what I thought they were—who I thought they were. But I know you, as well as you know me."

"What are you saying—that you've decided after nine centuries of hate that you trust me—no, that you _love_ me?" He makes a noise like he's trying to laugh, though it comes out too ugly even to be a sob, and the gun's barrel jabs deeper into her gut.

"No," she says, "I've decided after nine centuries that I'm tired of being alone," and disregarding the pistol she reaches up to him again, grabs the front of his shirt and draws him down to her once more.

He could pull the trigger, but he doesn't; instead with a sound like the splitting of the earth in a quake, he surrenders. The gun drops to the floor as he slides his hand under her back and pulls her up to him, his calloused palm hot through her blouse's silk. She folds her arm around his shoulders and yanks him close to kiss him, harder than before, savage enough to taste blood—she feels the sting of a bitten lip, though his or her own she can't tell.

The floorboards are bruising solid under their knees. Macbeth groans and shoves against her, and she arches her hips to grind against him—he's hard, not a gargoyle's stone, but enough for her human body, and she wedges her hand between them to undo the buttons of his trousers. The spell binding them has already mended the broken bone, and her fingers know how to work the puzzles of human apparel; she practiced until she'd mastered that skill, part of perfecting her charade. It had fooled him well enough before.

Though their lovemaking in Paris had not been like this. She'd been so careful during that affair, avoiding whatever intimacy she could without raising his suspicions, while still holding his interest, still convincing him that their feelings were mutual. The trysts they'd shared had been delicately tentative; she'd made sure they stayed dull and safe, too tame to provoke any hurt which would be shared and betray the ruse.

There is no delicacy now, nothing safe about the hands rucking up her blouse and tearing the silk, or sliding up under the hem of her skirt to feel the wetness between her legs. She doesn't wear underwear, if she can get away with it, and she gladly helps strip herself of the rest of the confining human clothes, even as she wrests off his own, pushing up his shirt to bare his gray-haired chest, shoving his unbuttoned trousers down around his thighs.

And yet those same hands are strangely gentle when they cup her breasts, when they curve around her ass to lift her up and pull her close. The calluses are rough, but the fingers are careful, their touch almost as hesitant, as if he yet fears pain, even if he desires death.

Sometimes gentleness can be painful, however, just as some pain can be pleasure, and she hisses with the agony of frustration as she scratches her fingers down his back. Her nails are long enough to score his skin, if only shallowly, and the pleasing burn across her own shoulder changes her hiss to gratification.

He hears it, and she feels him shudder against her, big hands squeezing her soft flesh as he buries his face in her neck. His beard chafes her throat as he worries at the skin with his lips and the edge of his blunt human teeth. Her human skin is so pale and soft he might leave a mark; idly she wonders if it will mark his own neck as well.

He thrusts against her again, urgently, and she puts her hands to her shoulder and shoves him back, until he's kneeling on folded legs on the floor and she's upon him, his waist between her thighs and her breasts pushed against his chest, sweat-slicked skin pressed together. She grips his shoulders to lift herself up, placing herself over him. As she slides herself onto his length, deep enough to bury all of him, he groans, long and rusty and breathless, and she's not sure if it's with his satisfaction, or if he feels some of her own.

How strange this is, without their tails entwining, without wings folding around them, enveloping them in the private shelter of two bodies and two hearts and two spirits joining. Even with their arms tight around one another, moving in rhythm together, she feels exposed. The draft against her bare back is cold, and when he thrusts, the base of her spine clenches to move a tail she doesn't presently have.

But then his rough strong fingers find their way to her back and stroke down her spine, to its tailless root and past, working into the sensitive cleft beneath as he drives up into her, and she cannot suppress her gasp at the electric rush rippling through her. Her release catalyzes his own, surging inside her, and for that moment they're joined, even without wings, feeling what one another feels by a magic even older than the Weird Sisters' spell.

She's still trembling with the aftershocks when she feels the shift begin. The curtains may be closed, but the sensation is too familiar to her, and too wanted, for her to mistake it. Sunset—sunset, at last.

She pulls herself away from him and climbs to her feet. He blinks up at her, flushed and dazed, begins to open his mouth in question.

Then he feels it, just as she does, the tearing agony of flesh and bone and skin being remade as the curse is finally cast off, restoring her to her true self for the night.

They're both moaning, bowed over with the pain, but she's more used to it than he is; by the time he swallows his cries and raises his head, she's already gone for the pistol laying forgotten on the floor. She snatches it up, crushes it to useless scrap metal in her talons and tosses the wreckage to him.

"Sorry," she says, grinning at him just to feel the proper sharpness of her teeth against her lips, "better luck next time."

"Demona," he says, and her gargoyle ears can hear all the many layers of emotion in his voice, confusion and anger and pain and everything else. Beautiful music, all of it.

He's bare-chested and sticky, pale and sickly, kneeling on the floor with his trousers down around his ankles and his human-small member dangling soft and limp between his legs. If she had a camera handy she would take a picture, but it's regrettably too risky to take the time to go and fetch one.

Instead she grabs the closed laptop off the coffee table, clutches it safely to her stomach as she dives for the window. The shattering of glass rings in her ears like a symphony, shards spangling her tough hide. She opens her wings and catches the wind, soars up into the deepening violets of the sunset sky. There might be people watching on the street below, but she doesn't care; she'll have to leave the city anyway, so she may as well make a dramatic exit.

Behind her she hears a thin voice on the wind, circles around to see Macbeth standing in the frame of the broken window, as nude as a hatchling just out of its shell. The broken window is bound to have alerted the building's security, system down or not; they'll be in for quite a surprise when they get into her office, if he hasn't managed by then to escape. Or get dressed.

She waves at him merrily and banks to catch the next current of air spiraling up from the cooling streets, lifting her up over the penthouse's roof.

" _Demona!_ " he hollers out the window below. The obliging wind whips away the rest of his words as she glides off over the skyscrapers, save one last whisper it carries to her ears: " _Why?_ "

But she's already out of sight, and besides it's not worth answering; he'll figure it out himself soon enough. And no doubt will come to take his vengeance on her for making such a fool of him.

Maybe by then she'll have figured out herself why she'd had no plan, no contingencies; why, knowing him as she did, she'd not known that he had been coming for her until he was standing before her. She knows she's not insane, but still, it had been a ridiculous lapse in judgment.

Well, it won't happen again. She knows that no matter where she goes on Earth, she can't hide from him forever—a month or a year or a century, perhaps; but in the end he will always find her. But next time she'll have a plan; next time, she'll be ready for him.


End file.
